‘If you’re unhappy with Reform, this is a soothing balm’: Gurinder Chadha on her reboot of A Christmas Carol

<p>The Bend it Like Beckham director has already created cross-cultural versions of Pride and Prejudice and It’s a Wonderful Life. Now, she is reworking Dickens’s classic – with an Asian Scrooge</p><p>To begin with, Gurinder Chadha was wandering through the Charles Dickens Museum in London, trying to commune with the author’s spirit. “If you were alive today,” the film-maker asked him, “what story would you tell?” And, she wondered in the same breath: “What can I bring as my own vision to this wonderful story of yours?”</p><p>While Dickens’s ghost didn’t materialise, she found her answers and, during lockdown, wrote her own version of his ghost story A Christmas Carol. Giving it the title Christmas Karma, the 65-year-old Londoner has created an energetic, flamboyant musical film starring The Big Bang Theory’s Kunal Nayyar as Mr Sood – her modern-day Scrooge – alongside Eva Longoria, Billy Porter and Boy George as the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. The rest of the cast is stacked like decorations on a Norway spruce, with Hugh Bonneville, Danny Dyer and Pixie Lott further illuminating proceedings.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/nov/07/gurinder-chadha-interview-christmas-karma-dickens-kunal-nayyar">Continue reading...</a>